New Jersey, Jersey City | Standard
Time: Friday October 26th – Sunday October 28th
Players: 1212 Winner: Eli Kassis

Friday – Registration/Prize Tix


To Ops or Not to Ops
Most judges on the circuit have their first interaction with the world of GPs through registration, I feel as if CFB uses ops as a bit of a “testing ground” for newer judges and employees. I didn't really have that experience, my only involvement with CFB in a registration capacity was at GP Vegas 2015 which was a very different universe indeed. To clarify, operations, or “ops” consists of largely customer service roles, such as registration, handing out prize tix and manning the prize wall.
I know a few judges who really don't like ops as a concept, and would rather not work a GP than have to work ops. I had a sentiment similar to this until GP Vegas 2018, I recall seeing a monstrous line up at he Prize Tix station, since a large event had just ended. I was free at the time and wanted to be able to help, but I was afraid of doing something wrong, and didn't really know how many points corresponded to how many tix, and no one there could really dedicate the resources to go over the station with me. I recall being a little frustrated with my inability to assist in that situation, and decided that at some point, I should do ops on at least one GP, so that in the future if a situation like that cropped up again, I'd be equipped to deal with it!

Registration Blues
To be perfectly honest, I wasn't incredibly excited about the shift, while I wanted to know how to do all of the functions in ops, doing a 10 hour shift of just registration or Prize Tix was a little bit of a frightening prospect. I'm a person that likes to be constantly busy, and doesn't really like to chat with my co-workers during down time. I've worked retail before and while I don't absolutely hate it, being on the GP floor is a much more rewarding and challenging experience.
Luckily, GP New Jersey was a packed event! Friday on registration was actually fairly steady, with minimal amounts of down time, processing transactions was fine, and pretty easy after the first few. For those that don't know, we generally close registration for events 10 minutes before the event is slated to start, and if people want to register after that, they start with a round 1 match loss, or if two people register late, they get paired together via “late registration slips” that the head judge of the side event will handle. If it's a sealed event, they just lose build time. For last chance trials, we don't do late registration, for obvious reasons. And if a last chance trial doesn't fill up we just put the players into the next one, since they launch every 15 minutes or so.
I'd already experienced a lot of this as a floor judge, so the procedures were fairly familiar to me, experiencing it from the registration end of things was definitely a little bit of an educational experience though!

All I Want for Christmas is Prize Tix
I did a little of the Prize Tix station at GP Detroit when there was downtime during ODE scorekeeping, on the table there's a handy cheat sheet with all the possible records of players and how many tix they should be given. Players would come up in pairs and you'd have to look at their match slip, and figure out what their record was based on that, and give them their tix. For “Double-Up” events, you needed to give them double tix. Notably, we had a double up event ending at the same time as regular event on the same paper, and I gave out the wrong tix for one event. Luckily, and strangely, the player walked away, and then came back letting me know I'd given him too many tix. It made me really happy that the player was so honest, and I wish there was something I could've given him to thank him for doing the right thing.
To prize out ODEs you'd have a tablet nearby, you'd look up the player by name and the software would tell you how many tix they were to be awarded. Overall not a totally challenging job, but it was kind of fun to talk to the players. I took this opportunity to congratulate them if they did well in their event. Or try and cheer them up if they seemed mopey about their performance. Overall Friday was busy enough with random tasks that I didn't get bored, but I feel like if I had to do just that for three days in a row it would get a little old. The only thing I didn't do was ODE registration, but honestly, I did a ton of that in GP Detroit as the ODE scorekeeper, so I feel like I didn't really miss out on much.

Saturday – Prize Wall & ODEs


How Many Judges Does it Take to Screw in a Chromatic Lantern?
Now I know what you are thinking, “Prize wall and ODEs are different things, and are not typically connected.”
You are right, they're not. So let me tell you a story about prize wall.
Prize Wall on Saturday morning is a sad and lonely place. Anyone who wanted to prize out from Friday events probably did that on Friday, and everyone else is either in main event, or is in side events. My shift started at 9. The other half of Prize Wall is Customer Service, which is largely giving people their sleep in special packages, telling them how many byes they have, or letting them pick up their per-ordered playmats. There are two spreadsheets that you need to use to check off whether people have picked up their stuff or not, and once you've done one of them you've done 100. The only other job during that time was standing vacantly at prize wall, ensuring that everything was well stocked (which it was) and watching people come by and look but not purchase anything. This is not hard. This is not really a job that needs 3 people on it. Like you need 3 people spatially, to cover all the stations, but there is really only enough work for one person.
I recall looking at the clock and thinking “I feel like I've been here for 4 hours,” and it was only 11. Luckily, something extraordinary happened, around 12 my lead came by and asked if I'd like to help with registration. I figured it was probably more busy than the nothing I had been doing for the past few hours and agreed happily. I entered the GP and was shocked at how hectic it was. To clarify, usually the prize wall is inside the GP hall, but this time, probably because of space, it was located just outside the entrance. I reported to the registration lead, who, looking quite frazzled said, “can you just launch some ODEs?” I was pretty excited, I like ODEs, and I especially like working when things are on fire, which I can assure you they most certainly were. To give you a perspective of how on fire ODEs were, they added three rows of tables in media res (meaning I's and J's were before A's) and still ran out of space and had to freeze registration for about 90 minutes in the middle of the day. The section didn't feel under control until about 5 or 6pm it, was insane. However, it was also incredibly rewarding. It's important for me to feel useful when working an event, and I definitely got that feeling by the end of Saturday.

The Uniform is Everything
So I've avoided mentioning this until now, but unfortunately this next story requires a critical piece of information to actually make sense. I felt like this might be my first and last shift on ops, and since the GP was so close to Halloween, I asked CFB if I could come to work in a costume. I hail from a heavy convention background, so cosplay isn't something that's totally foreign to me, and about 5 years ago I made a costume of a pretty iconic blue planeswalker, that's still pretty essential to WotC's branding. CFB agreed, and so I got to run around the hall looking like a I could draw three cards and put two back for the entire weekend. This is fine on ops because you're stationary and behind a desk and look like you're working. But when you're on the floor, say, running ODEs the experience is very different. A lot of GPs have cosplayers wandering around just enjoying the event, so more than once I would ask players what they were waiting for at the Red Gathering Point, and get a rather bewildered response, which I imagine accompanied thoughts like, “Why is this random cosplayer talking to us?” and “what does this crazy person want from me?” Since they certainly didn't realize I was a judge and would be able to seat them and launch their commander pod. Once I accidentally took a call in an adjacent modern event, and the player asked, “Are you a judge?” While kind of looking around to see if there was an actual judge they could ask their question to.
I also noticed that often players with results wouldn't call if they couldn't see a judge. This happened a couple times where I walked by and then a judge in uniform would walk by and the players would then flag them down. This was pretty interesting, and is a really strong argument for being visible on the floor. It was also a really interesting experience in the level of respect players give judges, I was treated much differently as a cosplayer than I am as a judge. I believe players really put their best face forward when talking and interacting with us judges, and we should always keep that in mind when we are doing investigations or taking calls.
Not that on average players weren't respectful to me, but it was a different kind of interaction. There is a certain level of reverence you get from them when you don the uniform that I didn't quite feel when performing basically the same tasks but in different attire. On an unrelated note, I had a lot of fun interactions with players, and the majority of them seemed to really enjoy the costume.

Back in My Day We Had Paper Brackets
One of the tasks I was given while covering ODEs was to keep an eye on three drafts that weren't put into kefka, and were being run on pieces of paper on a red clipboard. The players in those pods had been told to report to the judge with the clipboard, and later, when the responsibility got passed to me, to report to “Jace”. I feel like I was asked to do this because I was very visible. I wasn't asked to, but I also manually prized out the pods because I knew they wouldn't really be able to go to prize wall to get that taken care of. Which generated a suspicious look from the ODE lead when they asked me to turn in my promos and tix and I handed them a wad of 100s (since realistically no ODE judge ever has any reason to have or give out 100s).

Sunday – Prize Wall


Prize Wall, But For Real This Time
I was a little worried Prize Wall would be boring on Sunday as well, but luckily it wasn't, There were enough people just trying to spend their tix before they left the event that it was pretty busy all day. I was surprised at how many of the oversize cards we managed to sell, I used to think that at any given GP we only had 2-3, but we actually had somewhere closer to 10 of them. Another interesting thing that happened was that some players would buy out all of a certain standard card in our case if the vendors were buying it for a high enough price. This happened with Hedana's Climb, which I believe the vendors were buying at $3, so a player came and spent all their tix on the card, to convert tix into cash in a weird roundabout way. For reference a 10 prize tix is worth roughly $2.50 USD. Most of the challenges with this job were related to doing basic math, often players would just hand me a wad of tix and say “Give me as many packs as this will buy”. 360 being the amount of tix required to purchase a box, and also an amount of degrees commonly used in geometry operations, made some of the multiples of it easy to identify. As a side note, a major point of disappointment for players was the singles selection. A lot of players seemed to want to be able to get modern or legacy cards. I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable for CFB to include some of these even at pretty inflated ticket prices, just to give non-standard players something to pick up and be excited about at the prize wall. I feel like at past GPs the prize wall used to have duals and other exciting things for players to buy and work towards. Overall, I actually didn't mind prize wall on Sunday, it was kind of fun interacting with the players, and I got to joke around with them a lot.

...In Conclusion
I actually had a lot of fun at this GP, operations was a very different experience than judging and I'm glad I did it. I don't think I'll volunteer for operations again, but I will be more than willing to fill a hole if needed in the future. It also gave me a better idea of what to expect from registration as a judge too. Overall, it was an enjoyable, if a little easy, event, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. As a judge on the floor I'll be able to answer more customer service questions.
However, I'm eager to be in black again, and I have a nice suite of Comp REL positions lined up for GP Atlanta.